ANNOYING AMERICANS

One of my wife's favorite shows is Amazing Race, in which teams of two race against each other, following hints and challenges that take them all over the world. Being into travel myself, I like watching too, if only to experience vicariously the rush of learning new cultures and exploring new lands.

But lately, I've been increasingly annoyed by the contestants, who typify American travelers in my mind: loud, boorish, and whiny. One of the legs of the race last week involved catching a packed train in India. Several of the participants complained aloud about how smelly and crowded the ride was; many females thought they were being groped, and yelled at those around them not to do so or else they would physically thrown from the train.

Maybe they were getting groped, which is inexcusable in any culture. But maybe they weren't used to not having private space in a public setting. All of the American contestants -- men, women, white, black, young, old -- came off as though they owned the place, and as though they deserved better accommodations. Quit your whining; it's a rugged competition, for crying out loud!

But more irksome to me was the lack of willingness to subordinate to whatever culture they were in. To be fair, they are racing against time and each other, so maybe there's only time to be pushy and impatient. But it never seemed to occur to these Americans that they were the foreigners: that they were the ones that smelled and dressed funny, and that washing clothes in an outside pool of water was the norm, and that being packed tightly against strangers in a train is not the same thing as being groped.

Maybe I'm being too anti-American. Many of the participants marveled at the beauty and intricacy of the many cultures they were racing through. Others had their eyes opened to the poverty in which most of the world lives, and genuinely wanted to give back in some way, in a manner that did not strike me as patronizing or self-righteous. The show itself enlightens the viewer about places faraway from the US, rather than simply consuming foreign cultures and spinning them for maximum entertainment value.

Still, it irks me when Americans travel and act as if everyone around them are the ones who look out of place, backwards, and strange. By acting this way, it is they that show themselves to be those things.